He should have turned down the deal.
New York Giants Super Bowl hero David Tyree says he dumped nearly $500,000 into a health juice franchise on exaggerated promises of big money, only to lose out.
The former NFL wide receiver, famous for his 2008 championship-winning helmet catch, told The Washington Post in an exclusive interview that he ran out of money after pumping money into Clean Juice, a company promoted by former football star Tim Tebow and which also included investors such as MMA champion TJ Dillashaw.
Tyree said the company promised high-six-figure annual store revenues to its best owners, but his stores only made $10,000 a year in net profits, even though his stores were nearly always in the top 25% of stores for revenue and had strong sales for a Clean Juice franchise.
“For the first year, my father-in-law, myself and our two sons worked without pay,” his wife, Layla Tyree, told The Washington Post. “We were top-selling, so what was going on?”
The former All-Pro and his wife first learned about Clean Juice while traveling in North Carolina in 2019 and doing their annual juice cleanse ritual to flush toxins from their bodies.
“They had a great product,” David Tyree told The Post.
Excited about the health drink, Tyree arranged a meeting with the company’s CEO and co-founder, Landon Eccles, who and the Tyree couple immediately hit it off, and who, like the Tyree’s, professed to be devout Christians and described the company as a faith-based chain.
The father of seven, who worked as the Giants’ director of player development, was also looking for additional income after his retirement from baseball, and the largest contract he had signed as a player was a five-year, $6.5 million deal with the Giants.
So Tyree decided to open a store in Morristown, New Jersey, paying about $40,000 for a Clean Juice license and another $450,000 for equipment, including a $30,000 cold-press machine.
The NFL star said he hopes to make a handsome profit from Clean Press, which claims in federal filings that a decent operator could make $400,000 in gross profit from a single store.
In June 2020, the Giants declined to renew Tyree’s contract as director of player development, so the clean juice soon became more than just a side income.
“I never planned on being a full-time entrepreneur,” Tyree told The Post.
The Tyree couple opened the shop on June 26, 2020, as The Washington Post reported at the time. Their best-selling item is their cold-pressed juices: They sell six 16-ounce bottles of cold-pressed juice made in-house as part of a daily detox for $70, Layla Tyree said.
People on a juice cleanse drink almost exclusively fruit and vegetable juices for the duration of the diet.
However, things did not go as planned.
He soon realized that the stores were only able to generate a profit of about $10,000 a year, a situation that was made worse when company executives forced franchisees to stop selling freshly squeezed juice and instead sell juice that was already bottled outside the stores.
“After the first year, I quickly realized I couldn’t provide for my family,” Tyree told The Post.
Many of Clean Juice’s other 120 stores are also struggling, sources said.
To appease the angry store owners, Eccles had Tebow throw a Hail Mary.
The former Heisman Trophy winner gave the keynote speech at Clean Juice’s annual conference in August 2022.
He told the franchisees, who were at the JW Marriott in Charlotte, to never waver in his beliefs, saying he’s experienced hardships in his life but kept moving forward, according to a Clean Juice franchisee who was at the meeting.
He even handed out inspirational books. Mission Possible.
At the meeting, Clean Juice said the change to bottles would allow it to sell its juice cheaper, reducing costs and boosting sales.
Not everyone trusted Mr. Eccles, people familiar with the matter said. In 2016, he was on court-ordered probation for a year for falsifying a medical license while working as a district manager for the pharmaceutical company Warner Chilcott, according to court records.
According to sources, the move did not boost sales.
Sources said the store-made juices, which had a shelf life of around five days, have been replaced with juices that have a shelf life of 30 to 60 days and offer fewer health benefits.
The $30,000 cold press machine the franchisee had purchased was now essentially worthless.
“One of the reasons I took this job was the quality of the product,” Leila told the Post. “We spent a lot of time educating our customers, and that led to bottled juice.”
“We found that people don’t like bottled juice,” she said.
Profits across the chain fell further.
The Tyree’s visited Eccles in January 2023 to explain they were struggling to make ends meet, and Eccles agreed to not charge them 6% royalties for three months.
“So we thought, let’s give it a go,” Leila said, but she didn’t realize that the fine print in the contract Eccles had them sign required them to waive all legal rights to sue in exchange for a three-month royalty waiver.
No meaningful improvement was observed.
Tyree then made a businesslike move reminiscent of the time he caught Eli Manning’s high pass against his helmet while being tackled to stop the Giants’ winning run in the 2008 Super Bowl.
He converted Clean Juice into Tyree’s Table in August 2023, and now serves a wider range of food, including cold-pressed clean juices made in-house.
But the family still isn’t making much money.
“We have to start from scratch with zero funding,” Tyree told The Post.
The Tyrese are still behind on a $238,000 loan they took out from the Small Business Administration to open the Clean Juice store, and they’re locked into a long-term lease with their landlord that would cost $80,000 to get out of, Layla said.
“I’ve been in tough situations before,” David said, “but this time I’m scared.”
More than 50 Clean Juice operators, or a third of the chain, plan to form a franchise association by fall 2023 and hire attorney Leon Hirzel to take legal action against the company, Hirzel said.
Meanwhile, the Eccles family sold their seven-bedroom home in Cornelius, North Carolina, for $4.7 million on March 20 and their Irwin, Tennessee, home on July 31, 2023, for $1.29 million, according to real estate websites.
The company also sold its Clean Juice chain to Brix Holdings, owner of Friendly’s and Red Mango, in May.
Matthew DeAntonio, an attorney for Landon Eccles of Bradley Arant, said his client declined to comment. Tebow did not respond to a request for comment.
